How the Ming fleets missed Manhattan

Gavin Menzies declares, he does not claim, that between 1421 and 1423 the Chinese discovered Australia, South and North America, and nearly reached the North Pole – in short, the world. He is ‘certain’ that if there hadn’t been a disastrous fire in Peking’s Forbidden City, killing the favourite imperial concubine and causing the emperor to lose interest in long-range exploration, ‘China, not Europe, would have become the mistress of the world’. Furthermore, Mr Menzies suggests, had there been no fire New York might now be called New Beijing, and Buddhism not Christianity might ‘have become the religion of the New World’. The great seafarers you learned about in school, Vasco da Gama, Magellan and Columbus, Menzies writes, used maps which showed places the Chinese had long since reached; far from intrepidly sailing into the unknown, the European pioneer mariners knew where they were going and were confident they would not fall off the edge of the world.